Getting ready to conduct his most ambitious campaign? Bloomberg is signaling renewed interest in a 2012 White House bid.Paul Bruinooge/patrickmcmullan.com

Fanciers and critics of Michael Bloomberg alike, take note; there are signs he’s noodling once again about making an independent run for president.

Item 1: After two months of dilly-dallying, the mayor finally moved on the Occupy Wall Street encampment, just as — fancy this! — the polls were showing public opinion turning firmly against the squatters nationwide.

Item 2: The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed calling on Barack Obama to forego a bid for second term by Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen. Doesn’t seem relevant? Schoen, an experienced Democratic pollster, has been a Bloomberg intimate for years and one of the leading expostulators of the notion that an independent could really win the presidency in 2012.

Item 3: After the supercommittee announced it was unable to come to an agreement on how to cut $1.5 trillion from the federal budget over 10 years, Bloomberg appeared all over the place to pronounce Washington broken.

At a press conference in Staten Island, he declared: “The failure of the supercommittee to come to an agreement is just a damning indictment of Washington’s inability to govern this country.”

He went after Obama especially: “It’s the chief executive’s job to bring people together and to provide leadership in difficult situations. I don’t see that happening. . . This partisan paralysis and political cowardice is defining Washington, and we just cannot afford to have that continue.”

That’s the kind of talk we heard from Ross Perot before he decided to take the plunge and run as an independent in early 1992.

None of this comes anywhere near demonstrating that Bloomberg will run. We do know he took the idea seriously last year and spent a considerable amount of money researching the possibilities.

But with no clear path to victory in either major party, and no path to victory charted in American history by a third-party candidate since the Civil War, he seemed to have decided to save his money and his time and forego a quixotic bid.

Circumstances might seem different now. The economy has barely turned around and might head downward if/when Europe implodes. The president’s poll numbers suggest he has an uphill climb to re-election. Congress’s reputation is in unprecedentedly bad shape. Republicans are showing distinct unease with their choices for president, and the public is showing unease with the GOP.

Meanwhile, independents dislike everybody. And that’s where Bloomberg might come in. Perot, another billionaire businessman with mythical technocratic prowess, rode a wave of independent disaffection to a historic 19 percent of the vote in 1992. Bloomberg has similarly unlimited resources — and he would come at the race from a stronger position as a man with real governing experience.

Circumstances are also different now because Bloomberg is not taking any evident pleasure in his job. At least Silvio Berlusconi — the media mogul who became the prime minister of Italy as the country’s richest man and is the closest analog to Bloomberg on the world stage — seemed to enjoy his time atop Italy’s greasy pole before his recent resignation.

Not our mayor. He looks tired and bored and annoyed. And there are two long years until his liberation from the third term he foolishly sought.

But what is a man who clearly loves the spotlight, the attention and the idea that he is a get-it-done guy who transcends ideological and partisan categorization to do?

The path to 270 electoral votes and the presidency is no more evident than it ever has been for an independent. But combine his boredom with the opinion (which he might be inclined toward) that only he can save America from itself, and who knows what might happen?

I think I do. It is a terrific time for an independent to run, but only because the president is so weak. Bloomberg might even do better than Perot; he might even win a couple of states. But given his own ideological predilections — meaning, he’s a nanny-state liberal — it’s more likely than not that those states would be ones Obama would otherwise win.

If Bloomberg succeeds in capturing independents and a bunch of disaffected or depressed Democrats, he’ll ensure an Obama defeat and a Republican victory in 2012.

Which is why, somewhere, Mitt Romney is holding an effigy of Bloomberg and whispering in its ear: “Run, Mike, run. Run, Mike, run.”